3 Tips To Master The Text In Your InDesign Document

by Stefano Bernardi
Last updated 26 March 2018
5 minutes to read

Dealing with threaded text and overset text in InDesign is a constant pain when working with files produced in many languages.

Some target languages will have radically more or less text than the source language when you get the translated file, and that might impact the document’s layout and require you to have to fix various issues here and there.

We, InDesign users, are often very busy and sometimes we prefer to deal with issues when they come up.

However, there are strong reasons to “program” your layout to “host” a shorter or longer textual content.

Advantages

Working on the base language document (before going to translation) is the right choice because:

You understand the language and the context perfectly

You only have to edit one single document

You’ll have the final documents faster

Once you’ve learned these simple tips, you will be able to create your documents correctly and very easily. You’ll avoid mistakes and meeting deadlines will be much easier.

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1. Make the text jump

As illustrated in the picture, we often size text-boxes so that the text from a first box flows into a second one.

This is a very common way of dealing with text, but there is actually a better method.

By using “Column Breaks” you can control your text in a more precise and efficient way.

Columns breaks allows you to:

edit the text without having to trigger changes to the layout

replace your text with a shorter text

replace your text with a longer text

You can insert a “Column Break” in InDesign by pressing Fn + Return in your keyboard or by clicking on Type > Insert Break Character > Column Break.

Note: There are more break characters. I prefer to use the “Column break” because it allows you to jump from both a column to another and from a text box to another by using the same character.

2. Scale the text

Vertical and Horizontal scale are two text attributes that you might want to take into consideration to quickly adjust your layout.

Text has many different settings. Most of the time you won’t use many of those settings, so InDesign sets a default value.

The default settings for both the vertical and horizontal scale are 100%.

When you copy translated text into your document (or replace it using Redokun), longer text can overflow the box.

The result can be:

the dreaded red plus sign – this indicates that part of the text is hidden

text flows into the wrong box

An easy way to adjust this is by changing the scale of the text with a simple Find / Change:

Make sure that Find what: and Change to: fields are empty;

Click on the first icon next to the Find format: field;

In the window that opens, click on Advanced Characters Formats;

Set Horizontal Scale to 100%;

Click on the first icon next to the Change Format field and set the Horizontal Scale and Vertical Scale to a lower percentage (e.g., 90%);

Click on Change All – All the text in your document will be scaled to 90% and should fix the overflow text by taking up less space.

[Advanced TIP] Use a paragraph style

When I create the Paragraph Styles, I generally start from a Style that I use as a base to which I link all my other Styles.

When I am about to finish my document, I set this paragraph to have Horizontal Scale to 130%.

It results in all the text taking up much more space than it should. At this point, I insert “Column breaks” at the end of each chunk of text and resize the frame to contain the correct text before setting the Horizontal Scale back to 100% .

Stefano has worked on numerous mid to large–sized InDesign projects for Alstom, DeLonghi, Philips, and many others before starting Redokun in 2015.
As Redokun’s Co-Founder, Stefano spends most of his time helping customers to optimize their InDesign work-flow. He also holds in-house InDesign courses for companies in the Venice, Italy area.

19 Tips To Optimize Your InDesign File For Translation (Free eBook)

A short guide for InDesign users who work on multilingual projects.
It'll give you an exhaustive look into the issue of creating an InDesign document ready for translation.